News

Hi, fellow gamer and MMO enthusiast!

Today’s update brings some awesome news and a… less-awesome one. Let’s start with the former: a new video reveal on upcoming city content! This time it’s the Tech Tree and the Marketplace taking the spotlight!

GTR Partnership

Other than the usual ton of new features, during this winter we’ve been hard at work to bring you some very exciting business news.

Since the end of 2020, we’ve taken part in a competition held by investment fund and accelerator Global Top Round, which each year selects 10 game development studios from a pool of several hundreds to invest on and help with business development. As you may have guessed already, we’ve made it to the top 10!

What do we get from this?

First of all, we’ve already received an initial investment, and we’re looking to start another round soon to raise substantially more capital for the studio. Moreover, GTR is helping us reach a publishing deal for Fractured from which to receive additional funding. Last but not least, they’ll be coaching and supporting us on business development as whole, an area where we can surely benefit from external expertise.

What does it mean for Fractured?

It means a lot!

While we’ve been able to sustain the studio with money from our initial investment, Kickstarter and Founder Pack sales (which as a whole have recently surpassed 500,000 EUR!), we haven’t earned enough to expand our 8-people team safely (yes, we are the rare MMO dev types who don’t like to overreach and would rather stay financially stable).

With the funding that is expected to arrive in the coming months, we’ll be able to finally land those hires we’ve always desired – an animator and another programmer to begin with. If you think we’ve been developing quickly so far being 8 people (I hope you do), think how it could be if we were twice as many!

It’s Pay-To-Win! It’s coming! To the barricades!

Stop! 😀 Our deal with GTR has nothing to do with the design (and monetization) of Fractured. We’ll also make sure a future publishing deal is going to leave creative control 100% in our hands 🙂

Winter Alpha Delayed

Now, to the not-so-nice news.

Back in November, when the Fall Alpha was ending, we were pretty confident the Winter Alpha would start in February. Until little ago, we were still hoping we’d be able to stick to the deadline. As the month is ending, that is clearly not going to happen: the launch has officially been postponed to March.

Here are the main reasons why this is happening:

• The two open weekends we’ve run and the business news we’ve just talked about took away a considerable amount of dev time;
• The focus of the Winter Alpha was meant to be PvP only, but we decided it was time to kickstart the economy as well. Hence the marketplace, which took a good man-month to be developed.
• City conquests are taking way longer to be completed than expected. Just that. Damn nations and damn catapults! 🙁

I know you can’t wait to start this new playtest – and so do we. We hope you’re not too disappointed! The next time we’ll make sure to avoid mentioning a specific month and indicate a quarter instead.

That’s it for today!

See you soon for the next video update!

DISCUSS